Role: Principal Cloud Architect

Own end-to-end cloud and platform architecture patterns and help teams adopt them across ZoomInfo’s engineering organizations.

What you’ll do

Prototype and hand off:
- Design platform patterns end-to-end with reference implementations and documented rationale.
- Partner with implementation teams to roll patterns out.
- Stay hands-on via proofs of concept (POCs) and initial enablement; write reference implementations and open PRs.
Participate in architecture review:
- Bring a consistent, documented rubric to weekly architecture reviews.
- Expand a standards library and maintain Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
Own a domain specialty (choose one focus area):
- Cloud Infrastructure Architecture: cloud runtime, networking, service mesh, container platforms; ensure scalability, resilience, and security.
- Data Architecture: event streaming/messaging, database strategy, pipeline patterns, and warehouse/lakehouse approaches.
Define technology lifecycle:
- Evaluate emerging technologies via structured POCs.
- Drive standards for technology onboarding and phase-out.
- Lead evaluations of vendor changes and consolidation opportunities.
- Partner with FinOps on cost optimization, including emerging AI/model infrastructure spend.
Enable R&D teams:
- Host design reviews and workshops; act as a technical consultant.
- Make patterns consumable and self-service.
Shape multi-year strategy:
- Contribute to long-term platform direction (developer experience, delivery pipelines, and AI-augmented architecture review tooling).

Broad infrastructure architecture experience: setting technical direction across large-scale systems used by many teams; able to defend choices for real production workloads.
Multi-cloud & Kubernetes fluency: production experience with GCP and/or AWS, plus strong understanding of trade-offs.
Kubernetes experience: GKE or equivalent as the runtime foundation for modern workloads.
Infrastructure as Code: strong Terraform proficiency and GitOps workflows; designing/reviewing reusable modules.
Depth in at least one domain (nice to have more):
- Cloud Infrastructure: cloud-native networking (AWS transit patterns, GCP Shared VPCs, Private Service Connect, VPC peering), Kubernetes/service mesh (Istio, mTLS), scalability/resilience/cost, and security.
- Data Architecture: Kafka/Confluent or Pub/Sub; SQL (PostgreSQL, Cloud SQL), NoSQL (MongoDB), columnar analytics (Snowflake, BigQuery), search (Solr, Elasticsearch); pipeline tools (Dataflow, Cloud Composer, MSK, Kinesis); open table formats (Apache Iceberg).
- Development & operational depth: ability to validate patterns by reading code, understanding load behavior, incidents/on-call impact, capacity, rollout blast radius; comfortable shipping working prototypes.
Influence & leadership: strong technical leadership, writing and presentation skills; drive standards adoption without formal managerial authority.

Experience with AI-augmented architecture review tooling (e.g., MCP servers, LLM-based rubric evaluation).